Page 3764 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 September 2018
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There are a whole series of questions about legal powers and protections that remain unanswered. I will not go through the full litany of questions we asked yesterday and the failure of the minister to respond. But they were extensive and that, indeed, raised the attention of the media in this town following question time.
It is no wonder, then, that no-one trusts this government or the minister to deal with this properly and behind closed doors, as she is proposing. We have seen this before, this form of cover-up. And I certainly recall this. I was the shadow health minister when there were serious issues raised by the community, by health staff and by representatives of those staff that led to calls in this place for an inquiry. The minister at the time, Ms Gallagher, then said, “Yes, and the results will all be published. You’ll get a copy of everything. The results will be published.” That did not happen.
What actually happened was that the minister then used the public interest disclosure model to say, “I can’t give you any information,” and the whole thing was covered up. It is a reality after a series of hidden reviews, a failure of those reviews that have happened over many, many years, to actually address the issues and clearly they have not.
There are the repeated calls of doctors, as represented by all those groups, that it is only a board of inquiry that will provide the full protection and proper powers to actually solve this problem—assuming that that is what we want to do: solve the problem rather than cover up the problem, as has been done by ministers of this government before.
Importantly, what it does, under the powers of the board of inquiry, is provide an option for hearings in private and for those hearings to be protected. There is no need for witness to “lawyer up” and they can tell their stories with full legal protection. And that is so important.
Although the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation have not agreed there is a need for a board of inquiry what they have said in the paper today, and I quote from Matthew Daniel from the ANMF, is that there “had to be provisions in place to protect nurses who give evidence”.
These are the sorts of questions that we were asking yesterday. If not under a board of inquiry, what will be the legal instrument to provide those protections? We have not got an answer. What the minister says is that there will be a review. But everybody now—the doctors’ groups and the nurses’ groups—is demanding answers about what protections will be provided for those members who want to come forward and say, “I was bullied.”
I will say it again. There have to be provisions in place to protect nurses who give evidence. We repeatedly asked yesterday, “What will those protections be? What will the legal instrument be? How will that be done, if not done through a board of inquiry?” We still do not have those answers. What nurse, what doctor, what allied health professional, what other member of the health system who has been bullied is going to come forward to this quasi review, this quasi inquiry, what is clearly a
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